«As though his accomplishment were rooted in nothing but shame»: Shame and Tragic in Philip Roth

Abstract

Moving from the most recent studies on emotion, their artistic representations and, especially, from the analysis of the relationship between shame and literary texts as recently proposed by Timothy Bewes, this essay aims at studying the representation and the function of shame in Philip Roth’s so-called “American trilogy”. Through a close reading of the three novels – American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000) – it will be shown how shame is behind the contrast between private life and history as it is problematized in the texts. Moreover, it will be argued that is precisely in the symbolic field of identity and in the one of its relation to the others that the individual and the general dimensions collide. In this way, eventually, it will be possible to interpret protagonists ‘downfalls through the idea of tragic.